Does Vote Trading Improve Welfare?

Article dans une revue: Voters have strong incentives to increase their influence by trading votes, acquiring others' votes when preferences are strong in exchange for giving votes away when preferences are weak. But is vote trading welfare-improving or welfare-decreasing? For a practice long believed to be central to collective decisions, the lack of a clear answer is surprising. We review the theoretical literature and, when available, its related experimental tests. We begin with the analysis of logrolling – the exchange of votes for votes. We then focus on vote markets, where votes can be traded against a numeraire. We conclude with procedures allowing voters to shift votes across decisions – to trade votes with oneself only. We find that vote trading and vote markets are typically inefficient; more encouraging results are obtained by allowing voters to allocate votes across decisions.

Auteur(s)

Alessandra Casella, Antonin Macé

Revue
  • Annual Review of Economics
Date de publication
  • 2021
Mots-clés JEL
D02 D47 D6 D70 D71 D72 D82 P16
Mots-clés
  • Bundling
  • Quadratic voting
  • Logrolling
  • Vote trading
  • Storable votes
  • Vote markets
  • Logrolling
  • Vote trading
  • Storable votes
  • Quadratic voting
  • Bundling
  • Vote markets
Version
  • 2